The remains of the weekend

There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here. After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….

Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.

Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.

Where have blogs gone? Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals. This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?

Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing. I’ll need to come back to this. I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it. I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch. Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.

Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).

I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want. Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.

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This blog started in 2003. In the old days, I posted a lot more often, but most of those early posts were short links and things I'm more likely to post nowadays on Facebook and Twitter. I used to run a community blog site called EMUTalk.org;
here's a link to the archive for that site.